The piece of the puzzle of depression comes from addiction's destructive effects on an addict's life. There are broken relationships and often, problems with the law or finances. The individual starts to distance himself from the people he loves and becomes more and more detached. He may lose his job or start experiencing serious health problems. Ordinarily, addicts lose everything they care about: their homes, their families, cars, possessions, jobs and friends. Addiction is destroying the addict's life. No one would be happy about this happening.

Depression is an appropriate emotional response, considering the misery that the addict is faced with. Some psychiatrists and medical doctors will diagnose this depressed state as a mental illness and prescribe psychotropic medications. These medications will never do anything more than mask the depression temporarily. On the other hand, so will the addict's preferred drug or brand of alcohol.

Psychotropic drugs do not help a recovering addict restore their relationships or build a sane, drug-free life. They do nothing to help the person rebuild his or her health, in fact, they add more toxins to the person's system since all drugs have some toxic effect, even if minor. Medical personnel in the addiction treatment field treating this depression as a "mental illness or disease" expect that somehow their prescribed medications will "fix" the person. Then once "fixed," the person could then fix these situations in their life. This is an irrational assumption, if you think about it.